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In 2019, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been reacting to the public catching on to its blatant partisanship and prioritization of corporations and ultrawealthy donors by undergoing some image rehab. Unfortunately, the Chamber’s substantive policy agenda remains as regressive as ever—anti-family, anti-worker, anti-consumer and anti-climate.

For an example of the Chamber putting lipstick on a pig, look no further than its recently-unveiled “American Energy: Cleaner, Stronger” agenda released through its Global Energy Institute (GEI). The agenda uses lots of buzzwords like “clean,” “renewable,” and “sustainable,” and its acknowledgement that climate change is a clear and present danger demanding action could easily trick you into thinking that the Chamber has softened its historical opposition to meaningful climate action. But this is merely PR-driven smoke and mirrors.

A closer look at what the agenda proposes reveals that it’s actually a continuation of that opposition, proposing that climate change be “resolved” through the private sector rather than through legislation and regulation, and advocating America’s continued reliance on fossil fuels. By the Chamber’s own admission, the purpose of the agenda is to obstruct public action on climate: it warns of “state and national leaders go[ing] too far with policy recommendations” and proposes that instead the private sector should lead the way through “innovation and technology.” This is a tactic Frank Luntz promoted all the way back in 2002: use language that makes you sound knowledgeable and reasonable to get away with maintaining inaction on climate change.

This plan is not remotely sufficient to meet the enormous challenge of addressing our climate needs. The international consensus on climate change estimates that we have only 12 years to cut global greenhouse gas pollution in half in order to avoid potentially catastrophic amounts of global warming. No one who has studied the issue could say with a straight face that we can reach that target through “innovation and technology” alone drastic government policy change is needed to zero out U.S. pollution on the timetable we need. In fact, the Chamber even posits that climate action should not be time constrained (with targets like 10 or 12 years in mind), even though the nature of the climate change problem requires that we solve it quickly.

The Chamber does not intend to actually meet the task of preventing unacceptable levels of climate change; it just wants plausible deniability against accusations of being a bad actor on climate. The Chamber knows it needs to adjust to the reality that voters are increasingly concerned about climate change, but has chosen to do so in a way that opposes real solutions. The reality is that deregulation and continued reliance on fossil fuels will make things worse, not better.

Goosing Up the Numbers

The Chamber justifies taking this inadequate approach by using some very suspect public opinion polling, commissioned by the Chamber/GEI and conducted by FTI Consulting. As argued by clean energy policy analyst Joel Stronberg, the survey’s questions are designed in a loaded way aimed toward achieving the kinds of results the Chamber wants. For instance, the Chamber’s results show respondent sentiment is only weakly in favor of “[r]equiring all aspects of the U.S. economy to eliminate greenhouse gas pollution in 10 years, including in all electricity generation, vehicles, agriculture, homes, commercial buildings, and manufacturing, regardless of cost.”

This question is clearly designed to invoke various connotations. For one, the “10 year” time-frame primes respondents to be thinking about the proposed solution as a stand-in for the Green New Deal (GND), which has been widely vilified through right wing media’s disinformation about its actual contents. Furthermore, the long list of types of institutions that would require elimination of greenhouse gas pollution is meant to feel exhaustive to the respondent, thereby priming them to think what is being suggested is excessive or an “overreach.” Finally, the phrase “regardless of cost” is suggestive of criticisms that taxpayers as a whole will shoulder an unreasonable financial burden in order to pay for large-scale government action on climate.

It’s worth noting that, even despite the many ways this question was loaded, it still received 55% total support, meaning a majority of respondents still approved of the policy.

Another of the Chamber’s findings from its survey is even more dubious. It pits the “Cleaner, Stronger” agenda against the GND, and asks respondents which approach they prefer, and finds that across the political spectrum, the majority of respondents preferred “Cleaner, Stronger.”

Specifically, respondents were asked “Which option would you prefer as a focus of our national and state elected leaders?” and given to options to choose between:

‘Cleaner, Stronger’: America focusing on using its resources responsibly and safely by implementing a ‘cleaner, stronger’ energy agenda that prioritizes investments in innovation and advanced technology to reduce emissions.

Eliminating Greenhouse Gas Emissions: America focusing on requiring a transition to the Green New Deal’s proposal to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. economy in 10 years, regardless of cost.

As Stronberg argues, “The comparison of its announced Cleaner, Stronger America Agenda with the GND alone is deceitful. Only in a two-way comparison of the GND and the Chamber’s American Energy: Cleaner, Stronger campaign can rejection of the one be considered support for the other—even then such a conclusion would be suspect.”

The question falsely implies that pursuing a GND-style approach will not involve any investment in innovation and technology. It also uses the same misleading language to stand in for the GND as it did earlier, portraying the GND as a radical policy and “Cleaner, Stronger” as more measured and therefore reasonable. A GEI press release calls “Cleaner, Stronger” a “realistic alternative to addressing energy and environmental issues.”

What this framing leaves out is that a reliance on the private sector could itself be easily portrayed as the more radical policy. Taking strong legislative action against climate change is a commonsense way of ensuring that the United States meets its global climate action responsibility; pursuing a deregulatory agenda is a recipe for making climate change worse rather than better. But the Chamber wants us thinking about only about the political ease of each approach, rather than what is actually needed to properly address climate change.

The Cleaner, Stronger agenda’s use of PR-friendly buzzwords and highly questionable survey methods is all aimed at a singular goal: deregulating the energy industry, allowing fossil fuel industries to continue to profit off the emission of greenhouse gases that will have a devastating effect on the climate. We should not fall for this deception. The Chamber may pretend its plan is a sufficient response to climate change, but we must be honest that avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming requires significant legislative and regulatory action.

On Friday, the most sweeping anticorruption legislation since the Watergate era passed through the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 234-193. This democracy reform bill, otherwise known as H.R. 1 or the “For the People Act,” has multiple aims: to ensure that our voting and electoral systems are protected and satisfy the “one person, one vote” principle; to crack down on rampant corruption and kleptocracy in Washington; and to reduce the role of corporate money in politics. Among other reforms, the bill calls for an end to gerrymandering, more transparent and open government requiring corporate disclosure of political spending, and partial public financing of elections to lessen the power of the ultra-wealthy donor class in determining who wins elections in U.S. politics.

To the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, this bill essentially means a disruption in the established way of doing business in Washington—the status quo in which the Chamber and its corporate cronies have outsize influence over who gets elected and what legislation is passed. Therefore, it’s no surprise that the Chamber sent out what it called a “Key Vote Alert!” to all House members shortly before the vote was scheduled to take place, urging them to vote no on this bill that is vital to repairing our democracy. As the largest lobbying entity in the United States and a prodigious campaign spender, it is no surprise to see the Chamber sticking its head out on such an ambitious bill that would drastically reduce the influence of corporate money in politics.

While the bill passed through the House despite the Chamber’s protestations, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has stated he does not intend to bring the bill to a vote on the Senate floor, on the flimsy grounds that “I get to decide what we vote on.” Nevertheless, H.R. 1 is expected to be introduced to the Senate later this month, and sufficient public pressure to pass this wildly popular bill could force McConnell into conceding that withholding these sorely needed reforms from even getting a vote is an untenable position. You can bet your bottom dollar—and every other dollar you have—that the Chamber will be hard at work to keep McConnell from letting the American people’s representatives in the Senate have a say in whether or not it passes—so as to protect the millions of dollars it invests to try to sway elections.

In the text of the alert the Chamber sent to House members before the vote, the Chamber claims that American democracy “benefits from the robust participation of its citizens — whether they choose to engage individually at the ballot box or collectively through a party, association, or corporation.” By referring to corporations in the context of “citizens,” the Chamber is invoking the notion of supposed “corporate personhood.” Notably, the Chamber also recoils at the idea that the bill would “have the practical effect of prohibiting associations, corporations, from engaging in the political process.” This is an uncharacteristic instance of the Chamber, usually careful to keep up the charade that it exists primarily to benefit small businesses, “saying the quiet part loud.” The Chamber exists to promote the interests of corporations and the ultra-wealthy, but rarely does it admit to such so blatantly.

The reality is that voters do not believe that corporations are people and believe that corporations have “too much power” over politicians. By claiming that corporations have some unassailable right to a voice in our politics—which, due to the massive amounts of money corporations and their representative associations like the Chamber pour into lobbying and political advertising, inevitably drowns out the political voices of average Americans—the Chamber is making an argument that the public fundamentally disagrees with in an effort to convince the very same lawmakers whose coffers it lines that they benefit from the present system.

Elsewhere in the alert, the Chamber argues that H.R. 1 would place unreasonable burden on the kinds of “issue ads” (effectively, campaign ads in disguise) corporations are allowed to air. Likewise, it claims that the bill’s requirement that organizations must disclose communications with candidates or elected officials is “onerous.” This is clearly a bad-faith argument; the Chamber knows full well which of its “issue ads” should rightfully be considered campaign ads, and the disclosure requirement is a very simple way of shining sunlight on who is really funding the ads and potential conflicts of interest held by our elected officials. But as per usual, the Chamber paints itself as the put-upon victim of some overly harsh punishment rather than the truth—that it is a massive spender in American politics and it simply wants to maintain the status quo where it can safely influence elections and legislation out of public sight.

Luckily, the fate of H.R. 1 is not pre-ordained. No matter how much Sen. McConnell and the U.S. Chamber may want to deny the people the right to the kinds of reforms to our broken political system that they desperately want and need, they do not hold all the cards. By urging your senator to co-sponsor the bill when it is introduced in the Senate later this month, and to publicly demand that McConnell bring the bill to the floor for a vote, we can show that our democracy really is “for the people”—and no, “the people” does not include corporations.

In superhero comics and movies, it’s not uncommon for groups of heroes to put aside their differences and team up to fight injustice (think the Avengers or the Justice League). By banding together and synergizing their powers, these team-ups allow the heroes to be much more powerful as a collective than they could be as individuals.

This is a blog post about… not that.

See, comics also frequently have villain team-ups, wherein a motley crew of ne’er-do-wells gang up to wreak more havoc on society as a group than they could on their own.

In November, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce formed what it called the “Partnership for America’s Health Care Future,” which is a coalition of American groups representing varied private health industries that reap enormous profits from health care costs paid by the American people. Though the Chamber likes to paint this as an alliance of heroes fighting for justice—a kind of real life Justice League—there’s plenty of good reason to believe it’s a team-up of the more villainous variety.

These pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital special interests do not share the same goals on every issue, but on this one particular issue they are aligned with the U.S. Chamber: it is very profitable to them to keep the health care status quo in America. This is an issue so important to the Chamber that its president, Thomas Donohue, said during his 2019 annual “State of American Business” address that it plans to use “all of its resources” to achieve its goal. That goal? Stopping single-payer healthcare. The Partnership’s desperation to stop the growingmomentum and popularity of Medicare-for-All showcases a desire to preserve the status quo on the part of those who profit from it, no matter the cost to ordinary Americans.

One thing that Medicare-for-All would not do, however, is allow the US Chamber and its private health industry cronies to continue getting richer while the rest of us suffer.

The truth is that Medicare-for-All is not some world-threatening Big Bad that the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future is teaming up to defend the country from. In reality, it is just the opposite. And, since the Chamber and its big business allies are looking to maintain a health care system that places profits over people’s health, it’s no shocking plot twist that it is attempting to confuse and distract the public to hide that fact. That sort of conniving might make Lex Luthor or Dr. Doom let out a menacing cackle of delight.

In the fight for Medicare-for-All, it is We the People—grassroots activists from across the nation and the politicians who represent us—who are the real superheroes. It’s time for We the People to band together to take on the enormous and intimidating foe of American corporate profiteers to demand a more just health care system for everyone in the U.S. Afterwards, the celebratory shawarma is on us.

Never at a loss for spinning its corporate-friendly agenda as somehow benefiting working Americans, yesterday’s “2019 State of American Business Address” by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s CEO, Thomas J. Donohue, was a textbook example of using syrupy public relations-friendly language to mask the Chamber’s true intent. The speech laid out the Chamber’s policy priorities for 2019 and for the newly sworn-in 116th Congress in characteristically rosy terms.

A closer look at what was officially called the “#AmericanDreams” speech, though, paints a starkly different picture from how it sounded on its surface. The vision Donohue laid out—of maintaining private, for-profit healthcare; of an unregulated pharmaceutical industry free to price gouge consumers; of unrestrained use of fossil fuels that would pollute our environment and further contribute to climate change; of policies preventing consumers and workers from suing corporations that have harmed or discriminated against them; and of a total lack of transparency in corporate political spending—would be more like an American Nightmare for the average citizen.

When Donohue claims that the state of the economy is extremely strong, what he really means is that it’s great if you’re a CEO or wealthy stockholder raking in record corporate profits and increased share values due to record stock buybacks. However, the average American has been facing years of wage stagnation, job insecurity, underemployment, and a dangerous lack of worker protections. And, when he says “prudent regulation,” he means fewer safeguards for workers, consumers, and the public at large.

The Chamber’s well-funded and heavily-staffed lobby machine can be very savvy. So, when it says it will “take bipartisanship into account” we know that means that with a Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives in the 116th Congress, the Chamber cannot simply rely on congressional Republicans to pass its corporate agenda alone, as it’s done for years. And though the Chamber has added bipartisanship as a criterion in its 2019 legislative scorecard (at 10% of total score, making it roughly the weighted equivalent of the “participation” grade in an average college class), these feints toward moderation are merely PR. Its policy advocacy is no less extreme in its tilt toward corporations and the extremely wealthy folks who make up its donor base and against the average consumer, worker or family.

To wit: Donohue promises to “use all of our resources to combat” a single-payer healthcare system. Although such a system would overwhelmingly benefit the average American and is tremendously popular with the public, it would endanger the Chamber’s corporate buddies in the health industry, so the Chamber is now threatening to oppose it with all of its considerable lobbying might. Elsewhere in the speech, Donohue claims that protests of natural gas pipelines and the push to keep fossil fuels in the ground are causing undue strain on American traditional energy producers. In reality, this decline is because those entities are themselves fossils, tied to a business model that is no longer profitable (let alone prudent given the clear evidence of climate change). This willfully misleading stance proves the Chamber is just as beholden to the fossil fuel industry as ever.

Later in the speech, Donohue claims that Americans’ right to file civil and class action suits “undermines justice” when really it protects vulnerable populations from powerful wealthy interests. And, when the Chamber says that the U.S. should restrict shareholder rights to “reform” publicly-owned corporations’ policies on matters such as disclosure of political spending, it really means it wants average investors to have less of a say and intends to do all it can to ensure secret money continues to be dumped into political campaigns.

In all of these cases, the Chamber’s policy goal amounts to letting corporations do whatever they want with zero accountability and zero protection for the public interest. The Chamber may be attempting to put on a fresh new face to deal with a new Congress, but rest assured, its agenda is as pro-corporate and anti-Main Street as ever. Perhaps instead of promising to stand for “every child, every family, every worker, and every entrepreneur,” a more honest promise would be that the Chamber stands for “every corporation, every billionaire, every Big Bank, and every CEO.”

If you have followed Chamber Watch for long, you are intimately familiar with the reactionary, anti-democratic agenda of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As the nation’s largest lobbying group, the Chamber is the poster-child for the toxic influence of moneyed interests in our system. As the largest spender of secret money on political advertisements, the Chamber ensures that the public remains unaware of who is funding it, allowing its billionaire donors to remain in the shadows while pouring unfathomable sums into our broken campaign finance system. And by bullying opponents into submission with overwhelming capacity for corporate litigation, it plays a key role in hindering government efforts to impose and enforce commonsense safeguards and reforms protecting consumers, workers and the environment.

The Chamber is a key bad actor, but it is not the only anti-democratic force in our system today. Our democracy is in crisis because of the influence of the corporate behemoths and billionaire donors on officials in power. The nexus between moneyed interests and office-holders has resulted in profoundly broken institutions that fail to protect average Americans the way they are meant to.

From voter suppression to open defiance of the rule of lawto unchecked ethical violations, American democracy is under a constant onslaught of attacks. The power of special interests in politics have been wreaking havoc on our democracy for decades, resulting in a nation where average Americans have very little say over the direction the country is headed in and which policies are being enacted.

But thankfully, a new coalition of over 100 organizations inside and outside Washington, representing a diverse range of issue areas and constituencies, has emerged to confront the monstrosity of corporate moneyed influence. The member organizations individually advocate for a number of different issues, but all of them commonly recognize that the only way to move forward on their particular issues is to start with foundational, systemic reforms. This coalition, the Declaration for American Democracy, made its formal debut via a press conference on October 30. Now, following the midterm elections, the Declaration for American Democracy is committed to advocating for a large number of top-to-bottom reforms to address America’s crisis of democracy, starting with demands made of the 116th Congress.

The basic demands of the Declaration for American Democracy are:

Our democracy must ensure the freedom to vote and have that vote counted.

Our democracy must be honest.

Our democracy must have meaningful participation.

Our democracy must provide transparency into our government and our elections.

Our democracy must be responsive.

The U.S. Chamber is a massive wrecking ball, bringing destruction to our democracy through its multipronged efforts of lobbying, secret money campaign finance spending. It and other groups representing massive corporate and billionaire funds have caused tremendous damage to our democracy.

But it is not too late to repair our democracy, and bolster its foundations to prevent this kind of crisis from ever arising again. By following the Declaration for American Democracy and supporting its efforts, you can take action to demand much-needed structural reform to our system. This is our democracy—not the U.S. Chamber’s, nor wealthy donors’. It’s time we reclaim it.

It’s a basic foundation of a democracy: voters need accurate information about candidates in order to fulfill their civic duty in casting their ballots. But increasingly, it seems that this tenet may no longer hold true in the United States. Not only is our campaign finance system built in a way that prioritizes the voices and opinions of extremely wealthy donors at a far disproportionate rate to average Americans, but nowadays, much of the nation’s political contributing is done in the shadows.

Since the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010, the political donor class has begun funneling their money through non-profit organizations that can effectively make it impossible to trace since they do not need to disclose their donors. These organizations range from so-called “social welfare” organizations that are truly just a way to create political advertisements without disclosing who paid for them to trade associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which engage in largescale political activity yet likewise do not disclose their donors.

In fact, the Chamber is perhaps the single most active participant in this secret money sham. In Issue One’s new report, “Dark Money Illuminated,” the researchers find that between 2010 and 2016, the Chamber spent approximately $130 million on political advertisements—the most of any organization. It’s such an enormous total, in fact, that it accounts for roughly 1/6th of all political advertising spent by all secret money groups in that timespan. The Chamber is no stranger to massive election spending. As Public Citizen has previously reported, the Chamber spent about $30 million on the 2016 election cycle alone—and 100 percent of its spending was to benefit Republican candidates.

And while we could make educated guesses as to who funds the Chamber—the Koch Brothers’ massive far-right donor network has extensive ties to the Chamber, for example—the reality is that the organization’s lack of donor disclosure makes the source of its vast sums of political spending money untraceable. Public Citizen has found that in 2014, the Chamber reported 1,536 donations of $5,000 or greater, with the top 74 donors giving contributions of $500,000 and up, providing 57 percent of all its contributions for that year. Similarly, the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, the arm of the Chamber dedicated to restricting consumer access to the courts and lobbying against more aggressive prosecution of corporate crimes, received 99 percent of its total contributions in 2014 from only 99 donors. It’s clear that a tiny number of extremely wealthy donors are funding the Chamber, which is in turn engaging in unparalleled levels of political spending. And all of it is happening in the dark.

Unless serious reforms are made to our campaign finance system, the Chamber and other secret money groups can continue to bend our campaigns and public policy further toward the interests of the extremely wealthy using deep coffers of untraceable dollars. What sorts of reforms could be made?

One important change would be issuance of clearer guidelines setting the boundaries of what sorts of political activity different types of nonprofits are allowed to engage in—with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s vague “facts and circumstances” approach proving wholly inadequate. Public Citizen’s Bright Lines Project proposes the completion of a Treasury and IRS rulemaking, as well as various regulatory and legislative solutions to the problem of vague definitions of political activity.

Furthermore, Congress has various legislative solutions at its disposal. It could pass the DISCLOSE Act so that secret money groups like the Chamber are required to disclose the sources of the funds behind campaign ads on traditional media, such as TV, radio and print. It could also pass the Honest Ads Act, which would provide more transparency for campaign ads on the internet. Similarly, the Federal Election Commission (FEC)’s proposed rulemaking on disclosure of funding for internet advertisements should contain robust protections to ensure that voters know who is behind the advertisements they see. The FEC is also roiled in partisan deadlock, and substantial changes should be made to the agency’s structure to reduce its dysfunction and make it a more effective enforcer.

Another solution to this issue of secret money is to require corporations to publicly disclose their political spending. This would mean that corporations could no longer secretly donate to “social welfare” nonprofit organizations or trade associations like the Chamber to effectively lobby on their behalf. Because few corporations are likely to choose transparency of their own accord, the Corporate Reform Coalition works to persuade shareholders of publicly-owned corporations to vote in favor of disclosure requirements at shareholder meetings. The coalition also advocates for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to finish a rulemaking requiring corporate political spending disclosure at the federal level.

Last but not least, the option exists to confront the problem of secret money at its roots: the Citizens United decision and other Supreme Court decisions that have given rise to our campaign finance system. The Democracy Is For People campaign is a people’s movement calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related rulings that undermine our democracy.

There is no shortage of solutions to keep organizations like the U.S. Chamber from allowing the flow of political information in our country to be dominated by the interests of the extremely wealthy through secret money. Congress and the administration should work quickly to address this blatant affront to democracy. Voters need to be in control of our democracy, and that means having all of the information about who is trying to influence their vote, not allowing billionaires to pull strings while hiding in the shadows.

As the country anxiously watches the Senate Judiciary Committee conduct hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice, the nation’s political dialogue has been ablaze. Not to be left out, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce joined the fray recently with a blog post titled “The Right Judge for the Job.” The post, by Chamber president Tom Donohue, is exactly what it sounds like: a full-throated endorsement of Kavanaugh’s confirmation.

Public Citizen’s U.S. Chamber Watch project has frequently exposed the Chamber’s long-established right-wing leanings, from its campaign donations to the revolving door of staffers between the Chamber and various conservative institutions. But even by the Chamber’s standards, this endorsement is jaw-dropping. As the Chamber claims to be a politically unbiased institution only looking out for business interests, you would be forgiven for raising an eyebrow at the Chamber endorsing President Trump’s recent Supreme Court nominee. When you begin to dig into Judge Kavanaugh’s history of rulings, though, the Chamber’s support for his confirmation starts to make a whole lot of sense.

In a recent report, Chamber Watch found that in 25 of the 33 cases (76%) in which the Chamber, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), or the American Petroleum Institute (API) participated as party or amicus curiae, Kavanaugh sided with the position advanced by the business groups.

This investigation serves to underscore the extent to which the Chamber’s legal activity now intersects with federal policy. As Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, put it, “Over the past several decades, big business associations, led by the Chamber, have become far more active in federal litigation. The involvement of these associations signals to judges what the Chamber and other trade associations believe to be important.”

It is also consistent with another recent Public Citizen report that found that in 87% of cases, Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion in split-decision on issues like regulatory issues, environmental protection, and worker rights sided with Big Business and against the public interest. These issues are some of the Chamber’s top priorities; the Chamber wants fewer consumer safeguards, fewer environmental standards, and fewer labor protections, because those policies let it pursue higher profits no matter the human cost.

With all of this in mind, the Chamber’s fulsome endorsement of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation begins to look brazenly self-interested. It wants an ally on the Court who will rule with its arguments in litigation and with its policy agenda. Based on Kavanaugh’s history of rulings, it may have made a safe bet.

Do you know who owns the corner store in your neighborhood? How about the local plumber or woodworking business? Almost certainly, the answer is that the founders of these small businesses are the owners, and they receive the money that they make in revenue. In a lot of cases, though, it’s not nearly that obvious or transparent—and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would like to keep it that way.

Presently, companies are not required by federal law to disclose their “beneficial owner”— the real person who exercises control over the operations of the company or who ultimately receives the substantial economic benefits of the company. Right now, most states require more information to check out a library book than to start a corporation. And states allow corporate formation agents to fill out paperwork on behalf of secret clients, and even let shell companies form additional secret corporations like Russian nesting dolls of anonymity. The Panama Papers and Paradise Papers showed how secret companies are a global problem, but the problem is not exclusive to tropical getaways– the U.S. is a major enabler of corporate secrecy.

This lack of corporate transparency has some troubling implications. For one, nondisclosure of beneficial ownership can be a key enabler of money laundering as well as other secretive funding of criminal activities including terrorism, drug trafficking, and human trafficking. In short, the more difficult it is for authorities to track where and to whom money is flowing, and who owns particular assets, the easier it is for global and domestic bad actors to get away with criminal activity. In the United States, these anonymous shell companies have been used by criminals to carry out Medicare fraud, arms trafficking, and cheating people out of their savings using fraudulent investment schemes, all shielded from the prying eyes of law enforcement officials. So why does the Chamber oppose efforts to change federal laws mandating disclosure of beneficial ownership? According to the Chamber’s own testimony, “The Chamber and its members are committed to fighting criminals, terrorists, foreign powers, money launderers and any others who would misuse the U.S. financial system to carry out illicit schemes that harm our nation.”

But the testimony proceeded to argue that mandated disclosure of beneficial ownership is supposedly a misguided, flawed way to do that. This disclosure policy, the Chamber argues, would be “overly broad” and “unworkable” and would supposedly cause too much harm to law abiding small and medium-sized businesses.

This runs directly counter to polling of small businesses that shows strong support in favor of disclosure of beneficial ownership. And, the Chamber is putting forward flawed arguments. For one, the Chamber’s concerns that law abiding business owners would have their privacy invaded by disclosure mandates is dishonest; information the Chamber mentions, such as driver’s license numbers, would not be public domain. This information would not be released for everyone’s access, it would simply be disclosed to authorities. Second, the Chamber raises the possibility that good faith mistakes in filing the required paperwork would lead to innocent business owners being punished—but existing proposals for mandated beneficial ownership disclosure make clear that errors will only be punished if they are done “knowingly” and “willfully” (i.e. fraudulently). These proposals would hardly place an unbearable burden on legitimate businesses.

Besides, the kinds of businesses the Chamber worries would be collateral are not the kinds of companies that proposals for mandated beneficial ownership disclosure target. “Real” companies with lots of employees, shareholders, and profits are exempt from, for instance, the TITLE Act, as are companies that are registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

These spurious arguments on behalf of the Chamber raise serious questions about why the trade association wants to keep this information out of the hands of law enforcement officials. Certainly, very wealthy CEOs like the executives of the Chamber’s member companies may be exactly the sort of people using shell companies to hide assets to avoid having to pay taxes on assets the federal government does not know about. The classic image we have of “tax evasion” is of money stashed in a bank in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland, but the reality is that current beneficial ownership laws make it shockingly easy for the wealthy to create anonymous shell companies to hide their assets wherever they want to.

Furthermore, the right-wing organization American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has openly stated that its own opposition to beneficial ownership disclosure proposals is to protect the ability for extremely wealthy donors to influence elections and policymaking with secret money. ALEC claims that such proposals would “mak[e] it easier to attack supporters of viewpoints that are not politically correct or popular with the mainstream media”—in other words, the right-wing viewpoints of ALEC’s membership. The Chamber has extensive ties to ALEC, having sat on many of ALEC’s task forces and having pursued much of the same policy agenda. It’s likely that the similarly right-wing Chamber holds views on beneficial ownership disclosure laws as it relates to secret influence of elections similar to its friends at ALEC.

The Chamber claims to support efforts to stop human trafficking, drug trafficking, terrorism, money laundering and other crimes. But by opposing corporate beneficial ownership disclosure proposals, it ultimately stands in the way of those efforts. The Chamber may publicly claim that it’s just acting out of concern for law-abiding small businesses, but closer scrutiny reveals that their true rationale might be slightly less innocent than that.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you know full well that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s hostility to environmental solutions is nothing new. To give just a couple of examples, the Chamber litigated against the Clean Air Act; it co-sponsored a sham study that President Trump later cited to justify withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord; it has sued the EPA at least 15 times; and it once even infamously called for a “Scopes Monkey Trial of the 21st century” to put climate science on trial. Public Citizen even debated the U.S. Chamber on NBC’s Meet the Press over Obama’s EPA plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

Others have taken notice of the Chamber throwing its weight around in the energy arena, including Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). In a recent letter to Pope Francis, Sen. Whitehouse highlighted how the Pope’s global goal of climate action and emissions reductions is being undercut in the United States by the massive lobbying power of Big Oil. Sen. Whitehouse even explicitly called out the Chamber’s role in Big Oil’s sabotage of efforts at climate solutions, noting that “[g]roups like the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and others have been employed as adversaries of meaningful climate legislation, in some cases with little apparent support for their opposition from the majority of the companies that make up their membership.”

The senator hit the nail on the head when it comes to the role the U.S. Chamber plays in propping up Big Oil’s lobbying efforts. The Chamber is collectively receiving millions of dollars from ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco Philips, Occidental Petroleum, Philips 66, Hess, Apache, Tesoro Petroleum, Marathon Oil, Marathon Petroleum, and Noble Energy—and those are just the companies we know about because of their own spending disclosures, given that the Chamber does not disclose its donors. All of this adds up to massive lobbying power in the legislative sphere directed toward Big Oil’s interests, as the Chamber was, in 2017, the largest lobbying organization by spending in the country.

For its part, the Chamber is not at all ashamed of its role in propping up polluting energy sources to the exclusion of clean energy solutions that could ameliorate the effects of climate change or slow it down. Earlier this month, Chamber president Thomas J. Donohue published a blog post entitled “America Seizes Control of Its Energy Destiny,” celebrating the U.S.’s massively renewed focus on fossil fuel extraction and supply “bolstered by the Trump administration’s emphasis on pro-growth energy policies.” In other words, the Big Oil companies that make up the Chamber’s members and donors stand to profit hugely off of a shameless return to promoting fossil fuels to the detriment of green, renewable energy sources—and our environment.

Donohue’s post also promotes the Chamber’s Global Energy Institute, which works to “unify policymakers, regulators, business leaders and the American public” behind a Big Oil-friendly energy agenda. The Institute proudly touts buzzwords like “innovation,” “clean energy,” and “efficiency,” but the actual policies it advocates for are just the opposite. For example, it calls for offshore drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) that represent the same things Big Oil has always wanted: domination of the U.S. energy market to maximize profit, with no regard for the environmental destruction caused along the way.

True to form, the Chamber has also been painting the fossil fuel industry as the put-upon victim of vicious attacks by some massive opposition out to get them. In a recent post called “The Climate Change Tort Racket,” the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform wrote that “[p]laintiffs’ attorneys and left-leaning politicians are ganging up to shake down big oil.” The post asserts that these big bad plaintiffs are seeking to rob the poor oil industry of its resources, “looking for quick cash.” This, of course, ignores the plainly observable reality that Big Oil is a lobbying behemoth, armed with all of the legal power that the money of corporate mammoths can buy. Big Oil is Goliath, not David. Not to mention that Big Oil’s business is threatening all of human civilization with runaway global warming, and Big Oil has known about the threat longer than just about anyone and has been actively lying about it.

As Sen. Whitehouse’s letter to Pope Francis makes clear, the Big Oil lobby in the U.S., as propped up by the likes of the U.S. Chamber, has been an immovable obstacle in the way of the United States meeting its global obligations to reduce carbon emissions and promote climate solutions. Through blocking meaningful climate legislation, and through lobbying an extremely corporate-friendly Republican-controlled White House and Congress to remove barriers on the fossil fuel industry and deter them from alternative energy sources, the hope for the U.S. to be a global leader on climate issues seems grim.

Still, all hope is not lost. Nearly half of the Chamber’s board members have taken pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and a number of companies have already left the Chamber over its environmental policies. Customers who buy products from otherwise forward-thinking companies speaking out is one of the best ways to create enough momentum to get our nation’s leaders to finally stand up to Big Oil, fully embrace clean, renewable energy and become a force for positive global impact on mitigating climate change. By pressuring the Chamber’s members to #DropTheChamber and signing the petition to urge Pepsi, Disney, and Gap to stop funding the Chamber, the public can play a major role in moving the 800 pound gorilla that is the Chamber away from its current status quo of squashing climate solutions.

After the financial industry’s crash in 2008, taxpayers footed a bill for hundreds of billions of dollars for bank bailouts. In the wake of the crash, the U.S. government failed to prosecute any of the top bankers responsible for it. And, last December, the G.O.P. passed a tax cut that showered more wealth on bankers than any other sector. In so many ways, the sector responsible for a global economic meltdown has been rewarded, not punished, for their misconduct.

Apparently, this lack of consequences isn’t good enough for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. After the U.S. House of Representatives passed S. 2155, dubbed the “Bank Lobbyist Act” by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, on May 22, the Chamber released a statement applauding the passage of the banking deregulatory bill (which was subsequently signed into law by the president). The Chamber pushed hard for this bill: it issued key letters to both the Senate and House, and hosted an event earlier in the year with acting CFPB director Mick Mulvaney and Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon calling for “bank relief.” S. 2155, which reduces oversight over many banks and rolls back a number of the consumer protections enacted in the Dodd-Frank Act’s reforms, is just the sort of giveaway to Wall Street that the Chamber has consistently advocated for.

As is the Chamber’s M.O., advocating for this bill was couched in the language of “restoring small business lending” and abolishing “one-size-fits-all regulations” that were supposedly hampering small community banks. The problem is that that’s not an accurate reflection of the country’s economic landscape prior to the bill’s passage, nor is it a good description of what the bill actually does.

The reality is that the “Bank Lobbyist Act” reduces oversight on 25 of the 38 biggest banks. It strips away many critical consumer protections, including provisions to prevent racial discrimination in lending. It removes many of the guidelines keeping banks from engaging in the same sort of risky gambling activity that led to the crash just ten years ago. And, of course, when banks gamble with their deposits, those are funds that are not being used for the loans people need to buy a home or start a business. Allowing this sort of risky banking practices is setting up American taxpayers to potentially be on the hook for another bailout on their dime should the financial sector crash again.

As for those supposedly hamstrung banks the Chamber is supposedly selflessly looking out for? They were already doing just fine before the bill passed. The industry reaped a record $56 billion in net income in the first quarter of 2018. Even the small banks, whose financial wellness the Chamber prioritizes in its PR materials, were hardly suffering; loan balances at community banks rose significantly more in 2017 than across all banks. And the Chamber claims that small business owners have been hobbled by a lack of availability of credit in recent years, but according to the Federal Reserve’s September 2017 report, credit availability for small businesses has greatly improved in recent years and reached a stable point. It seems community banks and small businesses are just a smokescreen to make this Wall Street giveaway, the true goal of the bill, more palatable.

After the 2008 crisis, bankers did just fine. It’s the American people who suffered, losing countless jobs, savings, and homes. For the U.S. Chamber, it looks like risking a repeat of the Great Recession is worth it for the sake of Wall Street lining its pockets.